Traditionally, health care workers wanting to determine the presence of biomarkers within a patient's blood have had to undergo a time consuming process of drawing blood from a patient and performing tests on the drawn blood. Although accurate, current testing methods can be painful to patients that need frequent blood analysis (e.g., diabetic patients) and they do not provide immediate results for patients with rapidly deteriorating conditions.
In recent years, the semiconductor industry has developed biochips configured to detect the presence of certain biomarkers in a patient's blood stream. One common form of biochip uses nanowires serving as the gate of a field effect transistor. Such biochips operate to bring target biomarkers within a medium into contact with a nanowire, thereby producing a change in a current passing through the nanowire. Since current flow of the nanowire varies with the number of charged target molecules, monitoring a change in the IV characteristics of the nanowire provides an accurate indication of the level of the specific functionalized biomarker.